Something you should know
Living on a farm during pregnancy may help reduce the chance of the child developing asthma, eczema and even hayfever, say scientists.
Laffer Curve: The second derivative
Recent research on President Bush's tax relief in 2001 and 2003 has found that the lower tax rates induced taxpayers to report more taxable income. In particular, the reduction in the top two tax rates induced taxpayers to report more taxable income—an increase in the size of the tax base—to such an extent that this positive behavioral response likely offset roughly 25 percent to 40 percent of the static revenue loss of lowering the top two tax rates.
HT Greg Mankiw.
Your eyes, your hands, your back
Visual artists Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg analyzed over 10,000 songs to find out which parts of the human body were mentioned the most and broke down the resulting data by genre. The result: An interactive graphic work called "Listen" that correlates musical genres with the body parts they mention the most, as part of their ongoing Fleshmap project.
As for the genre that talks about body parts the most, hip hop takes the honors with more references than any other genre. Meanwhile, gospel refers to the body the least.
I really like this, definitely worth clicking through. Here's heavy metal, as hip hop might have disturbed readers of this family blog:
Hat tip MR.
Friday Special 69
Best moments in pictures of the Beijing Olympics 2008
Australia. A Baz Luhrmann Film
Could you be, the most beautiful church in the world
Informally known as Ronchamp, the chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp (French: Chapelle Notre-Dame-du-Haut de Ronchamp), France completed in 1954 is considered one of the finest examples of architecture by the late French/Swiss architect Le Corbusier.
Le Corbusier at first refused the commission, not wanting, he said, to be associated with a 'dead institution'.
What a poorer place the world would have been!
More pictures here, the Wikipedia entry with yet more eye-candy is here.
For economists and everyone that hates them, David Galenson takes a look at the greatest architects of the 20th century. You can find the paper at the NBER website - for some reason I can't access it right now. Find out who was the - objectively measured, naturally - greatest architect of the 20th century, the greatest building, as well as what Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright have in common with Howard Roark, the most amusingly one-sided character in all of fiction.
More Galenson here and here.
Bluematter. is back!
Sorry for being away for so long, and thank you for your emails - I never realised so many people would notice, let alone mind, my absence.
The reasons that kept me from the keyboard have not quite gone away, so posting will probably be slow for a while. In any case, I'm back to stay. I missed blogging.
The reasons that kept me from the keyboard have not quite gone away, so posting will probably be slow for a while. In any case, I'm back to stay. I missed blogging.
Friday Special 68
Friday Special 67
Total Borrowings of Depository Institutions from the Federal Reserve
Exactitudes: a contraction of exact and attitude
Friday Special 66
More on Mike, the headless chicken: Wikipedia & Website
Excellent wealth management tool
Britain seen from above
Incredible trees
Best sentence I've read today:
The Guardian described the (Russian) oligarchs as "about as popular with your average Russian as a man idly burning bundles of £50s outside an orphanage".
Friday Special 65
Can you guess where my accent is from?
It's time for some campaigning 2008
Impressive pictures from outer space
